For those in nursing homes, typically manageable illnesses and injuries can lead to serious complications and death. The body loses its ability to maintain itself and fight off infection, cognitive decline, and other medical issues. In nursing homes, the leading causes of death are as simple as commonplace infections and falling.
Fortunately, modern medicine has ensured that even for those in nursing homes, there are options to stay healthy. The development of therapies for advanced illnesses, antidiabetics, anticonvulsants, and a range of other medicines keep people healthy longer. However, the danger with many medicines is that they come with tradeoffs.
For instance, antidiabetics increase individuals’ risk for dehydration. It’s a small effect, but when 51% of nursing home residents are dehydrated already, it’s a dangerous effect. Medicine, for all the miracles it works, can become a matter of balancing one issue over another. This is why modern medicine has started to incorporate micronutrients more explicitly into geriatric care.
The benefit of direct nutrient infusions is they bypass the body’s potential inability to absorb nutrients. For instance, high water intake does not always mean a high level of meaningful hydration in the body. However, delivering Vitamin C and B12 intravenously to senior residents can bring the benefits of hydration directly to the individual.
The biggest benefit of nutrients is that there’s no downside. While modern medicines have very real and, at times, dangerous tradeoffs, a healthy body is never a negative. Nutrients can help to reduce cognitive decline, infection rates, and chronic injury. They’re not a solution to every issue, and can’t explicitly target illnesses, but they round out older populations’ health. In practice, that can be the difference between a few months and a few years of healthy living. See more about the impact of hydration in nursing homes below:
Source: DriptIV.com